In this blog post, Stuart Dunn explains the implications of a vote of the United Nations General Assembly to adopt the Equal Earth projection over the more commonly used Mercator map, which privileges the degrees of travel between to points on a sphere to surface area. In addition to explaining the differences between the two maps, Dunn also shares a link to a resource that visualizes how the differences have markedly altered the concept of relative size of different countries.  The author is also sure to point out that both projections, while necessary for different purposes, are not perfect:

Equal Earth certainly goes some way to addressing the historic visual imbalance [the Mercator map] created. However, and I will no doubt not be the only person to point out, it is not a “correct” or “accurate” visualisation, or even a “complete” one – no projection is. It is a set of mathematical abstractions and compromises which renders visible what is otherwise too huge to be visible. In that process, some combination of data – be it angles, surface area or symbology – will always be compromised. While the UN vote re-surfaces this debate and brings the matter back to public attention, Equal Earth is certainly not a panacea — a fact fully recognised by the authors of the paper in which it was originally proposed.

This post is a useful resource to explain to student the history of cartography as context for working with maps in the modern day, and it encourages those who read it to think critically about visualizing geographical data.

Alyssa Virker, with the Data Sitters Club, shares a very practical, no-frills post about topic modeling as part of its TL;DR series, which is aimed at people who “don’t know if digital humanities is right for you.” This post is ideal for introducing students to the method as a form of inquiry and exploration, in under 1,500 words. Rather than giving a step-by-step for conducting a topic model, this post explains what this particular mode of inquiry does and does not do, and that “topic modeling is a mere mortal swimming in ambiguity with the rest of us.”

The post includes links to to more dense theoretical frameworks and step-by-step guidance.

Zhaleh Nayebossadrian (Sapienza University of Rome) has published “De-Silencing History: From Private Papers to Public Data in the Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran Project” on The Digital Orientalist. Nayebossadrian describes the Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran (WWQI) and the digital turn in Persian studies, noting that WWQI

represents a landmark project in documenting women’s lives during Iran’s Qajar era (1796-1925). Born from a convergence of “intellectual frustration” with the perceived lack of sources and new “technological possibility” (Najmabadi 2016). It aims to challenge the focus on political history in this field. Nevertheless, it is essential to go beyond mere celebration of digitization. James Dobson (2019) advocates for a “Critical Digital Humanities” approach that questions the methods and assumptions embedded in our tools. We must view WWQI not as a neutral reflection of the past, but as a project that actively shapes the future of the discipline (Ward and Wisnicki 2023). This paper provides a critical introduction to WWQI, assessing its resources, recognizing its technical limitations, and exploring its potential for future research.

Nayebossadrian notes that WWQI not only aggregates materials held in repositories, but also makes items from private family collections available to the broader public. WWQI moved from a private vendor to the Harvard Library’s Digital Repository Service (DRS) in 2012 in order to provide more sustainability to the project, but Nayebossadrian explains that “the platform faces usability and structural challenges.” Another challenge WWQI needs to wrestle with is one of archival silences:

The WWQI is a feminist intervention aimed at addressing the absence of women in traditional historiography. As Jacqueline Wernimont (2013) warns, we must ensure computational tools do not perpetuate patriarchal privileges of authority.

A critical examination reveals inherent biases. The “private family holdings” that form the backbone of the archive belonged primarily literate, urban elites. This risks reinforcing “digital archival silences” (Risam 2019), effectively “de-silences” gender, while amplifying the silence of rural and non-elite women.

Looking to WWQI’s future, Nayebossadrian says that “the archive’s next chapter should shift from passive preservation to active computational engagement” and focus on improving its platform and technical capabilities to convert “the archive’s rich metadata and manuscript contents into machine-readable formats.”

Published on The Gale Review, Gale International’s blog, “Collisions: Driving Through Digital Humanities in Search of Roadkill” by Gilberto Mazzoli (University of Konstanz) describes using digitized primary sources, keyword searching, GIS, ArcGIS StoryMaps, and Google My Maps to investigate the environmental history of automobility in the United States. The post discusses the difficulty of tracing evidence for roadkill before the term itself was in common use, along with related challenges of changing historical vocabulary, incomplete route information, and uneven archival evidence. This post may be of interest to readers working on digital methods, environmental history, and mapping as a research method.

Kalani Craig (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Michelle Dalmau (Indiana University Bloomington), and Sean Purcell (University of California, San Francisco) have published “Operationalizing Minimal Computing Values Through Shared Computing-Platform Development: A Case Study of DigitalArc and Opaque Publisher” on In the Library With the Lead Pipe.

The article discusses the authors’ experiences working on two minimal computing archive projects, DigitalArc and Opaque Publisher, providing a useful case study of building minimal computing tools and hosting them on GitHub along with a critical analysis of their approach and the wider practices of archival and minimal computing work.

From their abstract:

This article explores how minimal computing principles guided the parallel web development of two related but distinct publishing platforms, DigitalArc and Opaque Publisher.  DigitalArc, a community-driven digital archive and exhibit platform, was developed in response to principles governing post-custodial archiving, taking it one step further to ensure communities maintain ownership of their materials and their digital artifacts. The Opaque Publisher, originally developed in support of a born-digital dissertation, adapts DigitalArc to support refusal theory for scholars who have to negotiate the tensions between using unethically obtained evidence in support of their research with moral objections to a lack of informed consent. At first glance, the use cases for each platform seem different, but both are providing mechanisms for individuals-by-proxy and communities to assert control over how their respective stories are shared.

Those interested in minimal computing and creating digital archives would find the article a useful example and resource for critical work being done in those fields.

Models All the Way Down, a Knowing Machines project written by Christo Buschek and Jer Thorp, breaks down the relationship between a large AI model and its training data.

The authors focus their article on the LAION-5B training set, which is a enormous, open dataset of captioned images. The model is widely used for research and public facing projects to generate new images or captions, but because of its size, very few actually know what all the images are that the model contains.

This is the major concern of the authors, who state “What this training set contains is extremely important. More than any other thing, it will influence what your model can do and how well it does it. Yet few people in the world have spent the time to look at what these sets that feed their models contain.”

In the article the authors explain that a project at Stanford University found that LAION-5B contains a significant amount of images depicting NSFW content including child sexual abuse material. The authors investigate how training sets are collected and curated (often by other ML models) to show the importance and necessity of building transparent and ethical, safe practices for dataset curation to stop exploitative and harmful collection practices especially for use in machine learning contexts.

The author’s investigation of the LAION-5B dataset shows the lack of care and responsibility in dataset curation despite these datasets being the core of many of the ML models and products being used everyday by people everywhere. This concern is something the authors, and other members of the Knowing Machine project, are taking seriously.

Knowing Machines is a project investigating Machine Learning Systems and how they are trained to better understand the relationship between training data and the algorithms they inform. From the project website:

We are developing critical methodologies and tools for understanding, analyzing, and investigating training datasets, and studying their role in the construction of “ground truth” for machine learning. Our research addresses how datasets index the world, make predictions, and structure knowledge cultures. Working with an international team, we aim to support the emerging field of critical data studies by contributing research, reading lists, research tools, and supporting communities of inquiry that are focused on the foundational epistemologies of machine learning.

Their homepage contains more information and articles, like Models All the Way Down, making clear what is often hidden in large ML datasets.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) released a statement on March 20, 2026 outlining the organization’s concern and stance on recent events affecting Iran, the Gulf Region, and the Eastern Mediterranean.

The full statement is quoted below:

In light of increasing hostilities affecting Iran, the Gulf Region and the Eastern Mediterranean, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) expresses deep concern for the growing humanitarian impact and the heightened  risks to the region’s rich and diverse cultural heritage.

IFLA is monitoring the situation together with our members in affected areas, and with partners across the international cultural sector, including UNESCO. In line with our mandate, we express serious concern for the wellbeing and safety of library staff, and users, as well as for the collections and facilities they protect, steward, and enjoy. Libraries play a vital role in the realisation of human rights, including the rights to access information and participate in cultural life. The destruction of libraries,  their collections, and other cultural sites – whether through damage, destruction, or displacement – is a loss to all humankind.

We are therefore alarmed by reports of damage to cultural sites, as confirmed by UNESCO. as well as reports of damage to educational institutions. In line with the Declaration on the protection of archives, libraries, museums and heritage places during armed conflicts and political instability, IFLA calls on all parties to uphold their commitments to protect cultural heritage. Namely, we call on all parties to comply with their obligations under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its Protocols.

Culture is an essential element for recovery, resilience, and for promoting peace. Our stories, creativity, research, and imagination are powerful tools for building understanding and connection. For these reasons,  the world’s libraries – and the people who sustain them – must be protected so that they may continue to serve their communities and strengthen  societies both now and in the future.

The Hague, 20 March 2026

IFLA provides additional context for how and why they craft these statements on the statement’s page. If you are curious about IFLA’s work in cultural heritage more generally their page,  “Promoting and safeguarding culture and heritage,” outlines the Federation’s practices as well as provides links to additional projects and resources.

Perspectives on History, the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association (AHA), has published an article, “What Altering Historical Images Can Teach Us About History” by Mary D. Lewis (Harvard University). Lewis’s piece discusses generative AI, noting that the August 2025 Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence in History Education included an “appended chart suggesting that students could ‘ask generative AI to produce a historical image for a paper or presentation.'” Lewis expressed shock, noting that “AI cannot produce historical images, only simulations thereof.”

Instead of asking her students to use generative AI to create “simulations” of historical images, Lewis created an assignment for her modern French history course that focused on encouraging critical thinking about the nature of images and media:

Rather than “produce a historical image,” which would be ahistorical, I want students to think about the historicity of real historical images and to reflect on how easily they can be manipulated. Concerned with the alteration of images I had seen on social media, I created an assignment in a fall 2024 lecture course that instructed students to modify a real historical image and then reflect on how manipulating it affected their understanding of the original image.

While this assignment did not use generative AI in the iteration discussed in this piece, Lewis expects that more students will choose to use AI tools as she reuses this assignment in future. As Lewis explains, while her students didn’t create historical images, “They manipulated one. And learned much more about history—and dare I say about the pitfalls of simulation—by analyzing that manipulation.”

The University of California Press Blog has published an interview with Cindy Anh Nguyen (Department of Information Studies and Digital Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles), author of a new monograph titled, Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam. 

The book “examines the Hanoi and Saigon state libraries in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam, uncovering the emergence of a colonial public who reimagined the political meaning and social space of the library through public critique and day-to-day practice.” Nguyen engages with digital humanities research methods when approaching historical evidence as data. In the Q&A she states:

There was a lot of unstructured data because they were primary sources and digital humanities gave me the intellectual background to structure and organize the data in systematic ways and to criticize it to see which spaces have data silences and biases–this type of information literacy is even more crucial and important now with the widening impact of artificial intelligence systems upon knowledge production.

The full Q&A post is available on the UC Press Blog. A free ebook version of Bibliotactics is available to read online through Luminos, the University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program.

A new special issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities was published in January 2026 on the topic of E-Lit, or Electronic Literature. Guest editors Samya Brata Roy (GITAM Hyderabad), Reham Hosny (University of Cambridge), and Leah Henrickson (University of Queensland) note that, as defined by the Electronic Literature Organization, E-Lit or “literature produced for the digital medium” has become a focus for DH scholars who engage with video games, interactive media, social networks, and digital storytelling. They further note:

“It [E-Lit] is not merely a subject of study but a medium in itself — a way for people to interrogate, explore, and engage with digital culture.”

The special issue features four reviews of projects that include theorizations on the digital humanities, arguments about critical making, and a showcase of E-Lit practices, representing a global selection of digital projects. Reviews in Digital Humanities is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal; find other issues and a digital humanities project registry at reviewsindh.pubpub.org.

Authors of “Exploring Data Detective Practices as a Class Activity” discuss their experiences as students and instructors in their data feminism course where they take on the role of ‘Data Detectives.’ In the course students learn data visualization and analysis tools as well as creating an “active practice through which we document our investigations of both qualitative and quantitative data under various themes” which becomes their detective work.

Our concept of Data Detective is modeled on detective work in a more general sense, where a person uses coherent, time-based, record-keeping of their activities to gain a better understanding of that which they initially do not know but want to understand. Thus, to act as a Data Detective is to discover and conduct purposeful, documented, and reflective actions needed to gain access to the desired data.

The article showcases students’ visualizations of their research journeys that detail the frustrations of trying to fill in data gaps by uncovering and sourcing data that was often “missing, partial, or deliberately obscured.”

The authors provide examples of projects and images of the final detective journeys that might lend themselves to data or information literacy instruction. Or, if you are looking for more data literacy themed ideas Nightingale frequently publishes similar articles under their Data Literacy category.